This is the story of Manzi and Maui, my Congo African Grey parrots. Eventually, Manzi is going to become a famous flighted parrot, so check out his blog. I tell about day to day activities, continual trick training and about the quest to become a free flighted parrot. Maui is the newest addition and I also tell about their acclimation to each other and techniques to improve their relationship.

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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

This evening, after getting into too much trouble, I scolded Manzi and put him in his cage. For the next 15 minutes Maui continued to scold Manzi using her regular, "Manzi, stop it!" This is in addition to two new ones: "Get out of there!" and "Go home!"

Monday, February 20, 2012

She learned by watching me trying to teach Manzi. I heard him saying, "work, work, work," so I began to congratulate him after each time and give him a treat along with the voice command. After two days of this, Maui began catching on. Manzi still wasn't saying the phrase on voice command, but he was saying it enough to realize that him saying it earned him a treat. On the second day, I asked Manzi to say, "work, work, work." After a pause of about 10 seconds, Maui chimed in with the phrase. I was waiting for Manzi, so Maui repeated it. Within two days she was saying the phrase within a couple seconds of the voice command. I'll get a video of it later this week. Now we need to start on a new phrase.

In order to keep Manzi from being left out of earning treats, I have been doing blind flights with him, where I go into another room and do recalls. Manzi is getting really good at this. I always go to a different spot in the room, or even into the closet and he is quick about turning the corner, looking for me and changing directions. I need to get Manzi prepared as I plan to fly him this summer.

Hercules has been keeping under the bird's cages more clean. He eats all of their scraps without objection. It has been a couple of times that Manzi will try to take back some dropped food from Hercules. Manzi knows that he can intimidate Hercules to hide in his shell, whereas Maui keeps her distance from Hercules.

Monday, February 6, 2012

I forgot to close Maui’s cage this morning. I was able to see on the camera. I have been locking them away from the food, so they are more encouraged to eat together. This morning neither of the birds was interested in their food, so I left the dishes in front of their cages with them locked up (or so I thought). A few minutes ago I checked their cages and saw that Maui’s was open. I am sure she will go down and eat her food to her crop’s content, and she will probably antagonize Manzi, as she has been doing whenever he is in his cage. Poor Manzi. Maybe he’ll have a bad day today.Since taking away the eggs, Maui has stopped being overly aggressive, which is Manzi’s cue to try and re-assert dominance. Yesterday he did two fly-by, dive bombs at Maui. She is always ready for him and isn’t caught off guard. I’m not sure the food technique is working. It took a couple days to get them hungry enough to eat together, then over the weekend since I was gone quite a bit I fed them in their cages, so I have not been very effective in implementing this strategy. I am losing my discipline.

Please send me an email if you're interested in access to the online camera. Also, remember not to leave it open all day (as was done by my sister: see previous post's comments).

Thursday, February 2, 2012

I have a replacement camera and it is up and running! I will only leave it running during the day, and while I am on vacation, and other times I forget to turn it off.

If using internet explorer, it has sound as well. The site to access the camera is:http://manziworld.hopto.org:8150

Once there, you will need to log in. To get log in information, please send me an email at adele (dot) thompson7 (at) gmail (dot) com.

An update on the birds:I took Maui's eggs away from her yesterday. She was very distraught about it and searched for over an hour digging around in her cage looking for the eggs. This morning, she tried to stuff a large toy ball underneath her body. The toy was one of these, that has a bell in the middle. It is nearly the size of her body.I began feeding the birds together again on the ground. I started last night. Manzi refused to eat on the ground and went without his dinner. I thought he would be more hungry in the morning, but he ran around all morning getting into trouble while Maui chowed away. Anyway, but this evening he finally humbled himself enough to eat off a plate on the ground, next to Maui. Hopefully this will get them to be more tolerable of each other.

Tomorrow night I will check my email and send out the user name and password to the the camera. Be mindful of the bandwidth and don't leave it on constantly in the background.